Denver and the West

Gun violence can be solved with science, public health experts say

Aurora police and rescue teams responded to the Century 16 movie theater early Friday morning, July 20, 2012. (Karl Gehring, The Denver Post)

Gun violence must be treated as a public-health issue — such as alcohol, smoking and traffic — say people concerned about gun-related death rates from mass shootings and random shots nationwide.

"Guns are where tobacco was in the 1950s," said Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program, who practices emergency medicine at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine. "There's a little bit of science and a great deal of reluctance to do anything with the results."

A public-health approach based on scientific research would provide practical solutions for communities — with the additional benefit of sidestepping the political quagmire of the constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms.

"It's not going to do any harm to look at it from a public-health perspective," Denver Police Chief Robert White said, "and it might help us get to the root of why gun violence is such a pervasive issue in our society and why there is such a pervasive need for young people to have guns."

The rate of kids killed by guns is more than 1½ times that of all people killed by guns in the Denver Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Broomfield and Aurora. In Denver, the rate of kids killed in such a manner is nearly triple that of all people.

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White's tenure as chief, which began last December, has been marked by a dramatic run of gun violence — a total of 21 fatal shootings — that included a brazen daylight wounding of a man by a teen near a Taco Bell on the 16th Street Mall, an after-school slaying of an 18-year-old near Manual High and the fatal shootings of two men at the busy intersection of Bruce Randolph Avenue and York Street. In June, Denver police Officer Celena Hollis was shot and killed while working security detail at a jazz concert at City Park, allegedly by a 21-year-old man who fired his weapon when he was jumped by members of a gang.

"There is tremendous violence with guns in our community," White said. "I think we need to have laws and regulation, but I also think there is a deeper-rooted problem, and we may need to look at this from an additional perspective."

In the mid-1980s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began to look at gun-related deaths and injuries as a public-health problem and to finance scientific studies into the root causes of gun violence.

Firearm-related suicides and homicides were the fourth- and fifth-leading causes of injury death in the United States, it said.

Males accounted for more than 85 percent of firearm homicides, and rates tended to be higher with increasing urbanization and among youth.

Metro Denver fits squarely into this trend. In the Denver Metropolitan Statistical Area, there were 122 firearm homicides among people of all ages — a rate of 2.5 per 100,000 people. But among youths ages 10-19, the rate was 4.1 per 100,000, or 26 firearm deaths that year.

In the city of Denver, there were 69 firearm homicides among people of all ages, for a rate of 6.3 per 100,000. But among youths 10-19, there were 20 firearm deaths — a rate of 17.7 per 100,000, more than four times the national rate of 4.2 per 100,000.

Some of the fiercest opponents of such studies have united behind an evidence-based approach to slowing the death toll that would respect the rights of legitimate gun owners.

"I still believe in the Second Amendment, and if we have to watch people die to preserve that, I guess we have to," said former U.S. Rep. Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican and member of the National Rifle Association who in 1996 carried the legislation that eliminated $2.6 million from the CDC budget to fund research on gun violence.

"But I think we can come up with a better way by studying the issue," Dickey wrote in an e-mail to The Denver Post, "like the way the medical community did when Kenneth Cooper introduced the radical idea of prescribing exercise early on in treating heart patients."

"Most politicians fear talking about guns almost as much as they would being confronted by one, but those fears are senseless," they wrote. "We must learn what we can do to save lives."

Elliott,
who served on the team of experts who used a public-health model to create the U.S. Surgeon General's 2001 report "Youth Violence,"
said it's important to understand how people reach the point at which they are so angry or disturbed that they are willing to take another person's life, and then understand what form that rage might take.

The top risk factors for youth violence, according to the report, include being involved in serious, but not necessarily violent, criminal behavior; abusing substances; being male; having physical aggression; coming from a low family socioeconomic status or poverty; and having antisocial parents.

It found that evidence-based prevention programs can be effective against all types of youth violence, even among youths who are already violent or seriously delinquent.

Those who want to use the public-health model for gun violence in America argue that it can provide solutions.

"We have used science to solve some very difficult problems, helping to save lives from cancer, heart disease, stroke, HIV/AIDS, polio and tobacco," Rosenberg said.

The public-health model was used to
successfully decrease the number of motor-vehicle fatalities in recent decades, he said. Instead of trying to change the behavior of drivers, safety measures were increased in the world around them, including seat-belt legislation, air bags, raising the minimum drinking age and increasing use of motorcycle helmets. As a result, an estimated 366,000 lives were saved from 1975 to 2009, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

"The average citizen has to see that their children are at risk when they go to the movies and to school, and that they are at risk when they go to work," Rosenberg said. "If there is a way to protect them and legitimate gun owners, let's find it out. We can use science to develop common ground."

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